Jim smiled. “I can tell,” he said, sliding past her down the hall toward Gill’s room, praying that she wouldn’t follow him. But Velma Peach had little interest in books. She went off toward the kitchen, blowing her nose voluminously, chattering about cold capsules. Jim strode across to where Gill’s journals sat tilted together against a glass brick. There were only three of them. There would be another box full somewhere — probably under the bed. And Gill would have taken a volume with him. That much was certain. But he couldn’t go heaving off down the hallway and out the door with an entire carton of three-ring binders. So he shoved the most recent under his jacket, pushing his hands into his pockets and holding onto the spine. He was bulky and pointy-looking when he hastened back out into the hall, but it didn’t matter, his friend’s mother was rattling in the sink. “Did you find them?” she called.
“Yes,” shouted Jim, “thanks.” And he banged out the front door before he was forced to carry on any more conversation. A minute and half later he was in his own living room, heart pounding, opening the heavy volume.
“There’s something screwy here with the dates,” said William, taking a sip of coffee. “That’s apparent at a glance. Most of this would be inconsiderable except for that.”
“They could be faked,” said Edward.
“Of course they are,” Latzarel put in, slathering butter and jam across a piece of toast. “Imagination is what it is. Exaggeration.”
“Look here.” William pointed at something in the journal, which, of course, none of the rest of them could actually see. “Here on the tenth of November. I’ll read it: ‘There were the bones of a child sprouting from the rocks like fan coral, waving in the green water when the waves washed across. It was very lonely and was picked apart by cuttlefish and carried away to build nests of human bones. Only a hand remained, and the fish wouldn’t approach for fear it would clutch at them.’”
Edward sat open-mouthed. “Where’s a calendar?” he said thickly.
William pulled his pocket calendar from his wallet.
“What was the date of the entry?” asked Edward.
“The tenth.”
“That’s a Saturday?”
“No,” said William. “It’s a Wednesday. Saturday’s the thirteenth.”
Edward pushed himself up from his chair and dashed from the room. “I’ve got to check the tide chart,” he shouted, slamming the kitchen door behind him. Outside in the maze shed, the Len’s Baithouse octopus leered out from the chart on the wall, wearing his foolish cap. Edward walked back into the house.
“Let me guess,” said Professor Latzarel, poking a scrap of toast in Edward’s direction. “You found the tidepool hand three days after the supposed date of the notation.”
“I found it wrapped around the skeleton of a fish — a tidepool sculpin from the look of it.” Edward rubbed his forehead. The whole idea of it was preposterous, outlandish. “You don’t suppose, do you …” he began, but Professor Latzarel, a rationalist, cut him off.
“Of course not. None of us supposes that for a moment. He was careless with dates. More likely, it’s a matter of self-grandeur — making up for obvious inadequacies, or so he would think. He manipulated the dates in a little game with himself — probably persuaded himself too. It’s a simple matter. Entirely a simple matter, like his nasal irrigator.”
“His nasal irrigator powered an airborne submarine,” Edward pointed out practically.
William nodded and sipped at his coffee. “I tend to fall in with Edward on this for reasons of my own. But look here, just for the sake of logic. Giles referred to the fish avoiding this thing, this hand, but they very obviously didn’t. Not all of them anyway. The hand got one of them. …”
“Got one!” Latzarel exploded. ‘That’s the screwiest part of the whole business. Prescience is one thing, but that sort of fabulous prediction is foolishness. It’s a matter of imagination, like I said. And damned peculiar imagination at that.”
William shook his head slowly. “Not a bit of it. We’ve come too far down the garden path to be frightened off now by an improbable spider. But this business becomes more and more strange, doesn’t it? We’ll agree for the sake of argument that he didn’t go home that Saturday afternoon and simply scribble in his diary alongside a phony date. He’d know, then, that the hand had managed to grab a fish. For what earthly reason would he pretend not to know? No, sir. I’m certain this was written days earlier. But is it a matter of prescience?”
“It must be,” said Edward, slapping the tabletop.
“Yes,” said William. “You see why too.”
“I don’t see a thing but foolery,” said Latzarel. “But explain it to me anyway.”
“Well suppose it’s not mere prescience,” said William. “It could only mean one thing — that Giles’ forecasts created the thing. That the tidepool hand was a product of his journal.”
Latzarel started to protest, but Edward leaped in before him. “But it can’t be,” he said. “Obviously. If it were, then the hand wouldn’t have caught a fish. The journal mandates against it. But if it were prescience, then we’d allow him the error. We can’t expect him to have had a vision of the entire future of that pool.”
“Of course not,” said William, happy that pieces were falling into place. He skimmed the rest of the entry, paused, and looked up. “Also,” he said, “if Giles were responsible for the existence of the hand, then squids would live in houses made of human bones. We can’t have one without the other.”
“True,” said Edward. “Look at the next page. We’re onto something here.”
On the next page, Thursday of the same week, was a single, short entry, “It caught its first fish, which was torn apart by crabs.” Following that was a name: “Oscar Pillbug.”
“Oscar Pillbug?” said Latzarel. ‘This is exceedingly strange. The lad’s demented.”
“Worse,” said William. “That hashes up the prescience theory.”
“Not necessarily,” said Edward. “It just allows for the possibility of the other. Of Giles the creator. Of squids in ribcages.”
“What in the world is Oscar Pillbug?” Latzarel asked.
“I think he meant Oscar Pallcheck,” said Jim. “He used to make up names like that, but they didn’t do any good. Oscar laughed at them.”
Latzarel nodded, easily satisfied. “Poor, tortured soul,” he said. “But look here. I don’t think this squid and bones business has any scientific basis. Surely by now someone would have documented the phenomenon. The oceans aren’t utterly unexplored, after all.”
“No,” said William. “But for my money, squids had no notion of living in skeletons before last November. That’s got to be the case, you see.”
“Unless Giles is simply prescient,” Edward put in.
“Of course,” said Latzarel, squinting into his coffee cup.
William whistled in surprise, pointing at the journal. There on November 13 was the name “Oscar Tarbaby.”
There was a silence round the table. “Ominous business, isn’t it?” said Edward
“Disturbing,” said William. “How much do you suppose he’s capable of?”
“You’re not suggesting,” said Latzarel, “that there’s some connection between this and the Pallcheck boy’s death in the tarpits?”
William shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything. The journal suggests a bit, though. Here’s more. ‘The silver wires of anti-gravity devices could be woven into the spokes of bicycle wheels or attached to a car’s exhaust system, having a similar effect in either case on the physical properties of the aether.’ Look how he spells ether here. Where in the world did he come up with that? He must get his data out of Paracelsus.” William paused to dump sugar into his coffee. “‘It could similarly be directed at a human lung, since the effect is one of emanated rays traveling on gaseous molecular structures.’ The boy’s a genius!” cried William. “I’ve got to get this to Fairfax. It alters the sensor utterly.”